The Vipers of Tinseltown

Blogger Nikki Finke may be the film industry’s fearsome foil, but Lee Siegel says she’s only the latest in a line of women journalists who have terrorized Hollywood’s A-list for a century.

Movie executives who live in fear of Nikki Finke, the Hollywood blogger who rains terror upon Hollywood rainmakers, might want to draw a breath and adopt a philosophical perspective. Finke is just one in a long line of women who have kept the powerhouses of the film industry in line.

Finke has been described as a “digital-age Walter Winchell” by The New York Times, but she brings to mind not so much Winchell—who threw his steel net far wider than Hollywood into politics, crime, sports, and journalism itself—than those earlier queens of Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood Hills: Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Rona Barrett.

Sending Hedda Hopper a skunk on Valentine’s Day, Joan Fontaine included a brief note: “I stink and so do you.”

It was Parsons who became so feared in Hollywood that she would descend upon the studios’ lots at Christmas and leave with her station wagon full of gifts, as though she were an ancient satrap receiving tribute from a colony. When Joan Fontaine wanted to insult Hedda Hopper, she prudently dulled the sting by making herself a target as well. Sending Hopper a skunk on Valentine’s Day, Fontaine included a brief note: “I stink and so do you.”

And Rat Pack chieftain Frank Sinatra might have referred to Rona Barrett as “Rona-Rat” (it was meant unflatteringly)—but he never sued her, and never humiliated her in public, as he sometimes did to both male and female journalists who had displeased him.

On a 1973 episode of Jack Paar Tonite, Rona Barrett and Sir Clement Freud, a British writer and grandson of Sigmund, got into a verbal sparring match over the business of gossip.

All three came from humble circumstances. Parsons was born in the small town of Freeport, Illinois, lived unhappily as a housewife in Iowa until her divorce, and then worked hard to make it as a single mother and screenwriter in Chicago before getting her first gossip column in 1914, when she was in her mid-30s. Hopper, from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, was one of nine children and the daughter of a butcher. She also married badly and struggled for many years as a character actor on Broadway and in Hollywood before landing her column in 1937, at the age of 52. Born in Queens, Rona Barrett was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when she was 9.

At first glance, Finke, a debutante from Manhattan, is a rarity in this wicked pantheon of secret-sharers. Her three predecessors were social and economic outsiders, who used gossip and schadenfreude as dubious levers of equality.

Yet there is more to marginality than material origins. When Finke’s detractors describe her many stints as a journalist at various magazines and newspapers, and her brief marriage, they may want to imply some type of instability or inner turmoil, but the effect is to make her as much as an outsider as Parsons, Hopper, and Barrett. An outsider’s temperament is every bit as sterling a credential for a gossip columnist as an outsider’s origins.

The irony behind the power of Parsons et al. was that these provincial, small-town—or in the case of Barrett, outer borough—vipers ruled sophisticated, cosmopolitan worlds. Never mind that they had come up through these very same circles.

Perhaps one reason Parsons and Hopper at least fought so long and hard before succeeding was that they never felt comfortable in the fast-and-loose world of entertainment to begin with. They clung defensively to their provinciality. But as gossip columnists blowing the cover on Hollywood glamour, their narrow morality became a strength. In the inflation-deflation machine known as American celebrity, they provided the deflations to over-the-top luxury and privilege that kept those inflated lives viable and popular. The American public loves to help power up off the floor.